IBM Cloud Powered by Rational Asset Manager

July 17, 2009

I am really excited to see the launch of the IBM Smart Business Developer and Test on the IBM Cloud. This is a technology preview of IBM’s Cloud technologies. Many customers have private clouds or are using VPN public clouds to host their applications. Having the elasticity to add more capacity quickly provide customers the ability to quickly react to increased demands for development and test services based on business needs or project lifecycles. Having the ability to find the right set of Developer and Test cloud services, provision them and auto configure them so that you can be up in running in minutes is also a huge time savings compared to the past. In the past customers would have to procure hardware, infrastructure services like application servers, database servers, web server and other security services. After that, they would have to procure, install and configure the software needed to to be able to begin development and testing. All of these steps could take months to do. With the IBM Cloud this is now done in minutes. What is really compelling for me is that the IBM Cloud is being powered by IBM Rational Asset Manager. I have written in previous postings, you must have a way to catalog these cloud services and virtual images so that people can reuse existing instances rather than instantiate or duplicate more instances of similar services that already exist. This duplication incurs costs from wasted time to create these duplicate assets, increased network bandwith costs and increased server processing utilization costs. The IBM Cloud shows how IBM is using Rational Asset Manager to manage these virtual images as assets. I recommend you try out the new IBM Cloud yourself. You can access it here. Or take a peek below